The time has come, the walrus said, the move off of Tumblr. The reason? Tumblr is blocked here in China. The inability to access my blog on a consistent basis (and the virtual inability of anybody else here to see what I’m writing) has finally led me to set out and do this on my own.
I’ll be keeping the same URL: www.illogicalmotion.com and I’m planning to use WordPress as my front end. Once I get the transition all set up, hopefully you guys will all come check it out.
In the meantime, everything I’ve written here so far will stay up here, it’ll just be at www.illogicalmotion.tumblr.com instead of the other URL. Again, I’m doing this against my will, I have nothing but love for Tumblr, but the inconveniences and downright stupid Internet policies of this country in which I live have forced my hand.
Thanks for reading this Tumblr blog and hopefully you’ll continue reading:
Very interesting article from one of the founders of Panic Software about how his home-work-mobile computer set up works. His main point is that he defends his preference for a MacBook Air over a MacBook Pro.
I recently made the stupid, awful, dangerous choice to look at the new Macs in the Apple Online Store. Before a minute had passed I could feel the wheels turning, I was wanting a new Mac.
Surprisingly, the MacBook Airs caught my eye, especially the excellent prices on the refurb ones. Because of its definite limitations (CPU power, HD capacity, etc.) I had never previously thought of an Air as a viable computer choice for me. I started thinking though, maybe with a bit stricter hard drive management and a bit of simplification of my workflow, I could make an Air work for me. And oh, that brilliant form factor would be so nice to carry around instead of this 15-inch MacBook Pro.
Then, after that enjoyable bit of fantasy, I had to dig my heels in and close that browser tab. I’m very happy with my computer now and certainly don’t need to be looking at new ones.
It’s great to see the president espousing his views through the intellectual medium of a New York Times op-ed piece. (I assume he wrote this himself, he doesn’t seem like the type to have an underling write something like this for him).
Also, I love the little notice at the bottom of the article, just to make sure you know who the author of the op-ed is: Barack Obama is the president of the United States. In a biographical blurb it doesn’t get much better than that.
Since I have been here in China, for about 2 weeks now, I’ve been using an unlocked and jailbroken iPhone. So far, it has been great. I used the redsn0w software to jailbreak and then the ultrasn0w software unlock and free the phone from the clutches of AT&T. When I arrived here I could simply pop in a China Mobile SIM card and I was calling and texting nearly right away.
The thing that I was not doing, however, was using the Internet. Apparently, because of a strange China Mobile policy, you are not able to add a data plan whenever you want. UPDATE: This actually is not the case. As it turns out, I guess all I needed was an update to the ultrasn0w software that I used to unlock the phone. Told that there was a new version of ultrasn0w out, I went into the Cydia application repository and downloaded the new version, rebooted the phone and boom, there was an E in the menu bar. There are certain times of the month that you can do this and I just missed it for July. Come early August I will be able to add the plan, but in the meantime I am getting a forced reminder of life pre-iPhone.
It is not fun.
I have heard that (in the United States at least) iPhone users use their phones for Internet-related tasks more than users on any other phone platform. I totally believe it. With a (nearly) fully-functional web browser and relatively simple software APIs that allow third-party applications to easily access the Internet in order to sync with web apps or perform other tasks, the phone really does become much more of an “Internet communication device” rather than solely a smartphone.
Interacting with services such as Twitter and Facebook on a consistent, highly-involved basis has become superbly easy and efficient in ways not quite possible on traditional cell phones or even desktop computers. Personally, I know there is no way I would use Twitter half as much as I do (or did, actually, before I came to China where the site is blocked). Being able to pop into a Twitter application on the iPhone, tap out a tweet and then go back to whatever I was doing, all in less than a minute, was a game-changer for me. Prior to that, I could not see enough of a return on investment of my time on the desktop to put any meaningful time into Twitter. Data access with the iPhone completely changed that.
Even aside from services like Twitter and Facebook, the ability to just pop in and check the latest weather or find your location in the Google Maps application make data indispensable.
Luckily, with a recent update to the ultrasn0w unlocking software, the data on my iPhone was enabled. It’s EDGE, but that is certainly enough for most of what I want to do. Now, if only Twitter and Facebook were not blocked…
Although I’ve experienced many of these things in reverse, having moved from the US to China, this is still a good read. Makes me look forward to things back in the US whenever my time is done here.
The other day I downloaded the iPhone SDK and started playing around in Xcode. I did a couple of the beginner tutorials and created a basic “Hello World” application. I wanted to put it on my iPhone to test it out on the actual device, and also to show it off.
These are the moments when I cringe because these are the moments some of the weirdness that surrounds Apple reaches out and touches me. In order to get a working application on my iPhone I need to sign up for the iPhone Developer’s Program, and pay Apple $99.
So basically I have to either pay $99 and hope that I can actually learn and apply Objective-C programming to a level that justifies paying $99 to do so, or I have to operate within the very limited confines of the iPhone simulator on the Mac (which, by the way, is a rather impressive simulation of the iPhone, but it simply doesn’t compare to actually using the application on the phone).
I’ve been reading a lot recently about all the hullabaloo surrounding the App Store. Although this issue that I’m having isn’t what all the talk is about, it’s still interesting when I personally have problems with the App Store. Assuming I do continue making apps, hopefully this isn’t a preview of a series of headaches to come.
